July 1–8, 1999

movies

Truffaut, Mon Ami

Two legends of French cinema reflect on François Truffaut, the filmmaker and the man.

by Sam Adams

"I demand," François Truffaut once wrote, "that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema.… I am not interested in those films that do not pulse." Looking back on Truffaut’s career as a mini-retrospective opens at the Ritz, it’s clear that not all of his films live up to that passionate ultimatum. But at their best, they express not just the joy or agony of making movies, but both at once.

Truffaut was a 27-year-old film critic when he knocked the world on its ear in 1959 with The 400 Blows — still one of the most galvanizing debuts in movie history. But he rarely made movies like a critic. While the silent-movie spoofs of Shoot the Piano Player or the antiquated jerkiness of Jules and Jim may nod in the direction of filmmakers past, Truffaut almost never indulged in wholesale genre piracy. (Only The Bride Wore Black, Truffaut’s attempt to pay homage to his idol Alfred Hitchcock, sinks beneath the weight of its tribute.) Despite the profound influence of directors like Jean Renoir or Orson Welles, Truffaut continued to reinvent himself film after film.

	"Through storm and calm our friendship went on," says Jeanne Moreau of Truffaut. "He loved women, he loved what was feminine. He needed it."

Both Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jeanne Moreau have extensive careers outside of their work with Truffaut. Léaud, a kind of New Wave everyman, worked with New Wave directors and disciples from Jean-Luc Godard to Aki Kaurismäki, so many that he was awarded his own retrospective five years ago. Moreau, already a star when Truffaut cast her in Jules and Jim, became a feminist icon and cinematic legend. But both are still most closely associated with characters they created with Truffaut: Léaud with Antoine Doinel, the Truffaut surrogate introduced in The 400 Blows, and Moreau with the headstrong Catherine of Jules and Jim. In New York for the April opening of the Truffaut retrospective, each took time in separate interviews to look back.

Léaud was but 14 when Truffaut picked him to star as the troubled Antoine Doinel, whose reform-school childhood and promiscuous mother mirror Truffaut’s own youth. The film closes with the shot that forever identified Léaud with the character, whom he would play in four more Truffaut films. After escaping from reform school, Antoine runs to the ocean, and after reaching it, he turns toward the camera, which zooms in to freeze on his face, crossed by a mixture of regret and confusion. Léaud, 55, still projects Doinel’s intensity, though his face has narrowed. Slouched on a sofa at the chic Stanhope Hotel, he looks raffishly cadaverous.

"Filming Antoine Doinel," Léaud recalls in French, "was a sort of complicity between François and myself. He knew how I was going to move my arms, how I was going to open my eyes. In the beginning, I didn’t really know who François Truffaut was. But when I saw the finished film, I burst into tears, and I recognized my own story in his."

Truffaut, Léaud recalls, used an unusual method when filming with him. "We began rehearsing, as if it were a play, with no crew on the set at all, and the scene would begin to develop spontaneously, sincerely. When [Truffaut] sensed that the tone was where it needed to be, little by little, the crew would creep onto the set as discreetly as possible, and finally, we would arrive at the first take."

Moreau, by contrast, remembers no such precautions on the sets of Jules and Jim or The Bride Wore Black. "We just worked," she avers, leaving no room for argument. "Great directors, they have their own idiosyncrasies, but there’s no such thing as a method. All the rules explode."

Moreau is 71 now, and the youthful roundness of Catherine’s face has long since faded. But what made, and makes, Moreau an icon is something more than physicality, a matter of iron will and free spirit. Calmly smoking in the corner booth of the Stanhope’s bar, her hair cropped short and straight, Moreau answers questions regally. When she is done speaking, she is done.

In an interview after Truffaut’s death in 1984, she summed up their long friendship this way: "Through me, François learned about women, and through him I learned about the cinema." Looking back now, she expands, "He learned a certain freedom. Even in his relationship with food, he was very strict. He would decide something was good, and he was so fearful of adventure that he ate the same thing on and on and on, and never taste champagne because it had a sense of evil. I said, ‘Just imagine something with bubbles, and drink it.’"

Beginning with his hatred of his mother, Truffaut’s tortured relationship with women is a story unto itself, one which Moreau views with ambiguity tempered by love. In The Bride Wore Black, Moreau plays a woman who seduces and murders five men she holds responsible for her husband’s death. Moreau attributes the film’s failure to Truffaut’s troubled relationship with his cameraman, and to his inability to fully understand the character. "I just realized a few weeks ago that he must have resented that woman. Fascinated by her, of course, but also terribly resentful. He was so macho, in a sweet way."

	Man full of trouble: Truffaut regular Jean-Pierre Léaud in Stolen Kisses.

It was in Moreau that Truffaut found the fullest embodiment of his ambivalent attraction-repulsion to strong and independent women. Yet the pair made only two movies together. "If he had asked me to," Moreau says, "of course I would have made more films with him. But he had to move on, to submit to his attraction to actresses, and that was what was beautiful about him."

Today it seems clear that Jules and Jim was Truffaut’s valentine to everything he loved – and feared – in Moreau. She agrees. "I’m sure it’s true, and maybe that’s why through storm and calm our friendship went on. He loved women, he loved what was feminine. He needed it." But she counters that Jules and Jim ends with Catherine finally contained. "Everybody forgets that at the end, two of them die, and Jules is left behind. And," she says ruefully, "he is relieved: That passion was too much."

Although she could have no idea what an icon the character of Catherine would become, Moreau says, "I knew we were doing something very special and very graceful. I had no idea the effect it would have on people, but I knew the effect it had on me. I thought, at last someone understands that when people say, ‘I’ll love you forever’ it’s a lie. I knew it was a lie from the beginning, since I was a child, and suddenly I had the luck to give life to a character who expresses interests for two different men, and that didn’t mean she didn’t love both."

Asked about Truffaut’s legacy, Moreau says he leaves behind a feeling for "the little things of life… daily life, daily emotions. There are times when you can feel the sweat, you feel the tears, you feel the pain. It’s on a daily, human level, but from that grows a certain poetry."

Léaud, anxious to return to his room, rushes through an answer and hurries to the door, but on his way out he pauses. "It’s the humanity of his films that is most important," he says finally. "That’s what people have forgotten." And with that he leaves, without turning back.

Truffaut Retrospective, at Ritz theaters: The 400 Blows, July 2-4; Jules and Jim, July 5-8; Stolen Kisses, July 9-11; Two English Girls, July 12-15. Call 215-925-7900 for more information.